SimCity Beta Opens This Weekend: Best Hour of Your Life?

When we first heard about the new SimCity we collectively swooned: it looked to be the best implementation possible for a SimCity game. Each subsequent information release made us slightly less warm to the upcoming game. While being honest about things that your users hate is better than surprising them at the end: best-case scenario would have been to provide the product we want.

The beta will run throughout this weekend, but that is not the only time constraint which beta testers will need to endure. So it turns out that all EA needs or wants from us in their beta test is a single hour of playtime. Consequentially, that will be all the time they will give us. That seems somewhat ludicrous to me given the time it will likely take to install and setup the game as well as the typical amount of time required to do anything meaningful with a traditional SimCity game.

Beyond that, the signup page is now closed with still several days to go until the beta opens. Yikes.

It is like EA is trying to drown its publicity to prove that PC-centric titles do not sell or something. Oh well, I will still probably be purchasing the title when it comes out March 5th -- but EA certainly does not respect the value of "Shut up and take my money".